


Take Ten

by wynnebat



Category: Leverage
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-10
Updated: 2015-10-10
Packaged: 2018-04-25 16:24:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4967938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wynnebat/pseuds/wynnebat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fourteen year old Alec's nan has mysteriously won the lottery. Sixteen year old Parker is stalking Archie's kids.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take Ten

**Author's Note:**

> For the "fork in the road" square of my [Trope Bingo](http://trope-bingo.dreamwidth.org/) card.

The thing is, Alec may have miscalculated.

When he'd—not that he's admitting anything, alright—first reminded his nan about the winning lottery ticket she'd bought a couple weeks ago, he'd thought the extra money would be great. Nan's medical bills became nothing overnight, she was able to put a down payment on a much better house, and he finally got into a better school. Dalton Prep is a mammoth thing, with multiple buildings, a team of administrators making sure their gifted students ratings don't drop a decimal point, and the most uptight team of teachers they could have possibly found. Even its sidewalks look like the type that if you spat on them, they'd cough and lecture you on propriety in a vaguely British accent.

Alec's favorite place is the small garden shed on the corner of the property. Unlike the boat shed, it's usually deserted of horny teenagers, since it has too many garden tools lying haphazardly around. Rumor has it that one terrible day, someone even got stitches there after landing bare-assed on a metal rake.

Alec may have planted even more tools in it (and one very inspired nail on its door), just in case, both to keep people away and hide the computer he's dragged inside. It's hidden in an old wooden chest that's known to never be able to be opened, which means no one tries anymore. It only took him a pound of butter and an hour of frustrated thumping to get it open and stick a clickety, wheezy old hard drive and fat monitor inside. The keyboard he keeps under a mat and the mouse in a tool jar, and if he ever hears someone coming by, he can kick everything closed and hidden in under three seconds. He's practiced it a dozen times, despite the fact that the gardeners don't work during school hours and most prefer the newer instruments stored inside the school. It's pretty much the only good part of attending Dalton Preparatory School. His own secret batcave.

Which makes it even weirder when Alec discreetly sneaks into the shed (physical education is for losers, he's decided) one afternoon to find a girl his age trying to play solitaire on his computer. And she's really pretty, but that's not the first thing Alec notices about her, because she's hanging from the ceiling like a bat, blonde hair floating in a mess around her head. She's holding Alec's keyboard between her thighs, which, well, is both really hot and a total invasion of privacy.

She glances at him as he closes the door behind himself and frowns. "You need to fix it."

"Fix what?"

She waves the keyboard at the computer. "This! It's uncomfortable to play like this. How do you even do it?"

Alec raises an eyebrow and shifts the plastic tarp that covering a rusty lawn mower and a comfy beanbag chair. It's even camo-colored.

"That's just boring," she huffs, then drops the keyboard and mouse into his hands. "Hold me, too!" she tells him, and before Alec can ask how and why, she's got a sturdy grip on his shoulders. Alec hears a soft click and the sound of something whirring—rope coiling back up, he realizes as the girl flips down using him as support.

"You're like a cat," Alec says, a little mystified and a lot impressed. "A totally crazy cat. I could've wobbled! You could've fallen right on a rake! Those things leave stitches."

"Stitches are for the weak," she says, grinning. "I'm Parker."

"Alec," he says, and is so glad when she doesn't reach out to shake his hand. All the people in this school, even ones his age, keep wanting to shake hands instead of give fist-bumps, and it's the weirdest thing. They're copying their dads, he thinks, but Alec doesn't have a rich dad to copy. Just his nan, and he doubts anyone here would take well to him adopting her habit of pinching cheeks.

And Parker doesn't even say her full name, and she doesn't emphasize her last name like he should know it, and she isn't the fourth of some line of twats. Alec half loves her already. And then Parker hops onto the chest, her foot catching on a wire and lightly knocking into the monitor, and Alec decides that if only for the sake of his tech, loving Parker is a really bad idea.

"So what are you doing here, anyway?" he asks her, dropping into the beanbag. It responds with a puff of dust, which is probably the worst thing about the shed, but he'd still rather be in here than out there.

Parker shrugs. "Oh, you know. Stuff—ah!"

She hops off the chest as Alec starts to hear a mass of loud voices spill out into the quiet outdoors.

"That's just everyone getting out of class," he tells her.

"I know," she replies, and whips out a pair of binoculars from somewhere before heading to the window. "I'm just... looking for someone."

Alec walks closer, looking out the small, dusty window of the shed. There's nothing really interesting outside, just parents (or rather, mostly paid drivers) picking students up from school. Alec can't even see anyone's faces from over here, though he guesses Parker can see it all more clearly.

"Are you stalking a guy?" he asks. Because there's crazy and there's _crazy_ , and he's only okay with the kind where Parker's not proving her true love to some guy by stalking him and going through his trash and maybe killing him so that no one else can look at him.

"Don't be silly," she says, but she's still watching the students with a scary kind of intensity.

Alec doesn't know why she's watching from all the way out here; she has a school uniform on, even if it's a bit big and a guy's instead of a girl's. If she blends into the crowd of students, no one will even notice a thing. For a couple long moments, he watches her just as intently as she's watching the scene, but it gets boring quickly. He switches to his computer, the reason he was here in the first place, and opens up a program he's been working on lately. It's nothing big, nothing illegal (he saves those for the computer at home), and nothing that can keep his attention for too long. That just means he's aware of Parker dropping the binoculars onto the windowsill with a thump, nothing like the careful way she'd treated her rope. Alec walks over and picks them up.

He tries to find the angle she'd been watching from, but then he just focuses on the thing he'd be upset about most in that direction. And he's a foster kid, just barely learning what it's like to have a parent who actually cares, which means there's one thing his eyes catch on. Off to the side, there's a man hugging his daughter while two more kids stand around them, holding a sheet of paper that probably has a great test grade in his hands like it's something precious.

He puts the binoculars down onto the windowsill and glances at Parker awkwardly. "He seems nice?"

It could be someone else she's stalking, but Alec's hunch pans out when Parker huffs out a breath. "He is. He's really nice."

"Is he your dad?" Because they look a like, kind of. The same blonde hair, the same wiry form. But then there would be no reason for her to be hiding in sheds and stalking him instead of standing with her siblings and getting a hug, too.

"Sort of," Parker admits, tugging at the rope around her waist. "But he's not my real dad, so I can't live with him. He still teaches me dad-things, though."

"Oh," Alec says. Some of the foster kids he'd known had something like that, where their real parents visited them sometimes. His are long dead, which is its own hurt, but that means he's never felt the raw wound that reopens when bad parents keep making things worse. Or just not trying hard enough, he thinks with a glance at the window. He can just barely make out Parker's not-family driving away.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

Parker shakes her head.

"Do you want me to hack his alarm system so that his fire alarm starts going off at random times?"

She smiles, just a little bit. "At four AM? Archie _hates_ four AM."

"Every day for a whole week," Alec promises.

Parker nods, and it's a promise made. Except, then she's leaving, and Alec's mouth moves before his brain catches up. Nan's said it's a terrible habit to have, but at least it makes Parker pause.

"Are you going to come back? Because I could—uh—show you how to turn the screen upside down too so that you can read easier when you're upside down? When you're upside down here at least."

It's a long moment until Parker grins and says, "Yeah. I'm going to come back."

She does.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Complete; no sequel planned.


End file.
